Jensen Huang got the kind of night every CEO prays for: an earnings print so strong it temporarily dispelled the AI bubble panic and made Wall Street’s doomsayers swallow their talking points whole.
Nvidia posted $57.01 billion in Q3 revenue — smashing expectations — and said data center sales hit $51.2 billion. Demand for the next-gen Blackwell chips? “Off the charts,” Huang said, noting that cloud GPUs are “sold out.”
And as if earnings weren’t enough of a tailwind, the White House stepped forward to warn Congress against restricting Nvidia’s chip sales to China. For Huang, it’s a political endorsement wrapped in a strategic wink.
Even Carson Block — the short-seller who normally treats tech valuations like overripe fruit — said it’s “not the time to bet against America’s tech giants.”
Yesterday, the S&P snapped its four-day losing streak. Alphabet rallied on the back of its new Gemini model. Nvidia jumped 5% after hours. For a moment, the AI scaffolding holding up the entire market looked sturdy again.
But it’s worth keeping in mind: one earnings call does not a healthy economy make.
Amid the market volatility and wild daily swings this week, we’ve been keeping an eye on opportunities, both short and long.
In the Grey Swan Trading Fraternity, Andrew Packer issued a put option trade on the SPY earlier this week – and closed it out the next day for a gain of nearly 75%.
The AI Boom Still Holds—But Only Because Everyone’s Involved
For now, the fears of an AI-driven collapse are on ice. Nvidia’s numbers quieted the narrative that Big Tech overshot the runway.
But a deeper look reveals….
Since 2022, the Magnificent Seven have accounted for 75% of the S&P 500’s gains. More than 40% of Nvidia’s sales go to Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet.
Billions slosh in circular investments between OpenAI, Microsoft, CoreWeave, Oracle, AMD…and back again. For now, it’s a closed-loop ecosystem. If one giant sneezes, the entire sector catches pneumonia.
Over the past week, the markets were bracing for the worst precisely because the stakes are so high: an AI slowdown doesn’t just hurt tech — it ricochets through the entire economy.
Which is why this morning’s delayed jobs report matters even more.
Jobs: Better Than Expected, But Not Exactly Healthy
After a government shutdown that gagged the statistical agencies, we finally got September’s data.
The topline number: Jobs came in better than expected. Underneath the hood…
Manufacturing fell by 6,000 jobs — again.
Transportation and warehousing lost 25,000.
Healthcare added 43,000 (as always).
Restaurants added 37,000.
Wages grew 3.8% year-over-year — but lower-income workers saw wage deceleration, while higher earners saw faster gains.
And in the background:
DHS says 527,000 immigrants have been deported since January, reducing labor supply — an artificial tightening of the job market that Republicans praise and economists quietly worry about.
The new normal in the transitory period of AI and the Trump Great Reset: uneven hiring, shifting demographics, and sectors pulling in opposite directions.
November 19: Treasury Auction Weakest in 10 Months.
“What if you held a bond auction and nobody showed up?” That’s the perennial question plaguing a Treasury Secretary.
Yesterday’s $16 billion auction of 20-year Treasurys didn’t go as well as Bessent would have liked.
High yield: 4.706%
Bid-to-cover: 2.41 (below the 10-auction average of 2.71)
Demand is softening at the exact moment the government needs to roll over debt at record levels.
But here’s the Dollar 2.0 plot twist: stablecoin issuers — Circle, Tether — now hold 80% or more of their reserves in Treasuries. And under the new GENIUS Act, they’re required to.
Stablecoins are becoming the hidden buyers of last resort. Their market caps—projected to rise by trillions—mean they’ll be absorbing more and more debt issuance.
Crypto, ironically, is fast becoming a major prop of U.S. government finance. For now, crypto finance companies trade like a beta-adjusted tech stock. Oracle’s down 30%. Circle’s facing skepticism. If AI wobbles, this entire chain shakes.
We’re going to dive deep today into the Dollar 2.0 investment thesis with Ian King and Mark Jeftovic on Grey Swan Live! See details below.
Target Missed…Again
Another data point to add to our list of 11 real economy concerns we summarized yesterday:
Target reported its twelfth straight quarter of weak or declining sales. The stock is down nearly 35% this year.
Incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke says the company will invest $5 billion in digital operations and store upgrades.
In the K-shaped economy, Target’s numbers reflect the behavior of a squeezed consumer. Everyday consumers are paring their personal balance sheets, essentials, and doing a lot more browsing.
For a big-box store, that’s a slow death by a thousand receipts. Fiddelke quote of the day: “If you’re frustrated with our recent performance, we are too.”
The Natural Gas Super-Cycle
In the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, a significant natural gas pipeline boom is underway, marking the largest in 20 years.
Twelve major pipeline projects are scheduled to arrive next year — enough capacity to supply all of Canada.
This is America’s new geopolitical ace. The “Saudi Arabia of natural gas” gives Trump leverage no matter how many allies he offends.
Gas is the U.S. most influential export now, and it’s not slowing down. It’s energy, politics, and national strategy in one continuous pipe.
The Education Crisis No One Wants to Touch
The Atlantic published what any parent who isn’t distracted by their own “adulting” concerns already knows: American students are not being adequately prepared for the world they will inherit.
At UC San Diego, 900 incoming freshmen now fail to meet middle-school math standards. Five years ago, it was 30.
Nationwide, eighth-grade math scores have fallen back to 1970s levels.
Why? Let us count the ways.
Smartphones. Pandemic-era “no-zero” grading. The elimination of standards and tests in the name of equity. Attention spans shaped by TikTok. AI tools that encourage guessing over thinking. And a crazy obsession with race and gender.
The real economy is being tooled-up around advanced engineering, robotics, and AI — and simultaneously graduating a generation that struggles with fractions.
Call us crazy, but that seems like a miscalculation.
A Special Kind of Optimism
There’s a special kind of American optimism that believes every bubble is a feature, not a flaw.
We did it with dot-com valuations. We did it with condo towers in 2006. And now, with the AI boom, we’ve convinced ourselves that if enough GPUs are sold, history can’t possibly repeat itself.
Trump’s “grand realignment” agenda has half the country watching tariffs like they’re football scores and the other half worried they’ll be reassigned to a new political weight class.
Between market euphoria and political melodrama, it’s easy to forget there’s an economy under all this noise— a real one, with workers, factories, and bills that don’t care who wins Nevada.
We learned during the dot-com crash and the 2008 meltdown that it’s dangerously easy to lose track of the real world when the stock market starts shining bright enough.
AI euphoria on one side, Trump’s realignment politics on the other. Two competing spectacles that pull attention away from the quieter forces shaping the next decade.
AI and tech only care if the narrative persists. Markets could care less about partisan rebrands.
If AI corrects sharply? It won’t just ding retirement portfolios. It will stall hiring, squeeze wages, hammer business investment, shock the dollar system, and shake every political narrative heading into 2026.
The real stress test is coming—for Nvidia one day, perhaps. But bigger still for the entire American system. And in a special kind of way, that’s just the way we like it.
~Addison
P.S. Tomorrow, November 12, 2025 at 2pm EST/11am PSTwe’ve invited our friends at Prime Financial Services back to help you with tax planning for your investment portfolio ahead of the holiday season and closing out the trading year 2025.
Prime’s Nick Buhelos will join us again to make sure you maximize your investment returns – by walking you through the correct financial structure you need to take advantage of explicit IRS business rules that apply to individual investors.
If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.
